SBA Deal Structuring to Manage Risk in a Cyclical Industry

But, you know, they were, they were large businesses and you were playing with, you know, some of the largest companies in the world in the medical space, in the automotive space. And so, you know, I, yeah, I got the chance to see the China ev. Trade wars up close and personal.

Mean, like, you know, if you, you can read the Wall Street Journal and see what's going on, you know, in there over the past two years. And like we had a, you know, we were playing in that. And that was, you know, gave you a real sense of what good competition looks like, what really aggressive competition looks like.

Yeah. Yes. That's. It's quite a bit of experience. Okay. You have a baby boy, you and.

Your wife, a little baby boy. And my wife and I sort of look at each other and say, this isn't going to work. It's not going to work in the way we want it to work in that, you know, it was important to us to both be around, to be local, to be, you know, raising little boy together and 200 days a year on the road 12 time zones away, just like it's not going to cut it.

Okay. So then you say, well, this isn't going to work, what are you going to want to do? Well, I really enjoy running businesses so, you know, taking, let's call it, you know, daddy track and moving to a regional sales role, like that's not going to fly. Well, maybe it shouldn't be so global.

What if you switched over to a private equity backed company? Still very rigorous, very growth oriented. Okay. You're still going to be doing this, you know, 60, 70, 80 hours a week.

Like does that take you where you want to be and you've got still, you know, AJ's class in the back of your mind. And to me it was just this no brainer, like there was no other choice. Right.

Like I am going to buy a business because it allows me to have a more local life and still lead a team, work on something really interesting and grow it and check all those boxes sort of personally and professionally that I wanted to do, but do it here in the greater Washington D.C. area, which we had decided at this point was, was home for us. So we were happy to put down roots here.

I say the other big element Will is part of the compensation package at Amphenol was stock options and the stock had done well.

And so originally where I was looking at a traditional search, you know, this was not retire early in your 30s money, but it was certainly, it was enough and you know, really lucky that this could serve as the equity inject for a business that was me, plus an SBA backed loan and that would, that would do sort of a reasonable size deal of what I was looking for.

So it was this combination of, you know, what do I want to do and do you have the capacity to do it? That started to converge at this, this same point.